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While feminization of the medical profession has become a mass phenomenon in all Western countries, it is analysed in somewhat contradictory ways. Most studies hesitate between a “universalistic” approach, assuming that women doctors will, over time, adopt the same professional practices as the previous mainly male generations of doctors, and an “essentialist” perspective that puts emphasis on the “specific characteristics” of women’s practice of medicine. This article shows that women doctors do indeed tend to adopt specific practices, particularly as regards management of the inter­ face between family and professional life. However, male doctors increasingly adopt such so-called “women specific” traits. Once male doctors start living with well-qualified partners who aspire to deriving benefit from their qualifications on the labour market, it is equally difficult for them to conform to the “ethos” of permanent availability for patients that was long the professional norm in France. Although men continue to dominate the higher ranks of the profession, they are also under pressure to adapt their relationship to the profession and to the domestic and family sphere. Analysis of these professional dynamics thus demands that particular attention be paid to gender dynamics as an organizing principle for medical practice.